Often as I scroll through social media or have conversations with my “nonvangelical” and atheist friends, we discuss their general sense of frustration with any effort to reach out and speak to evangelical people. The common gripes are often that conversations with evangelicals quickly devolve into discussions of theology and dogma, and that in those dogmatic debates no evidence or reason (even if drawn from the Bible itself) seems to sway evangelicals from their concrete positions.
It’s Time for a “Men Too” Movement
Fall 2017 began the first waves of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. Survivors, mostly female, finding the strength to publically warn the world about the terrible things their attackers had done filled me with such joy and hope.
Yet the uncovering of each new famous sexual predator brought back vivid and terrible memories. Their accounts of the violence they experience set off flashbulb memories in my mind; tiny vivid relapses in which I can feel my brother’s hands again and smell his breath.
Pennywise is real (and you can stop him)
Last week the film adaptation of Stephen King’s bestselling novel “IT” premiered in theaters with record-breaking results. Audiences flocked to their local cinemas to watch a film about a supernatural clown named Pennywise who terrorizes and devours the unsuspecting children of the small fictional town of Derry.
When did fandom go mainstream?
I'm old enough to recall a time when being obsessed with things like movies, science fiction, games, and comic books was enough to get a kid bullied at school. At the tail end of the 1970's and early 1980's the most acceptable outlet for "popular" boys was sports, and anyone over the age of 12 or so was expected to abandon their action figures (or "dolls" as my dad often called them) for the more serious quest for things that might actually make a boy popular with girls his age, and lead to an active dating life.
A "Mashup" experience leads to better understanding
In February of this year, I brought the varied members of my development team together here in Richmond, VA for a single purpose: I could sense their growing frustration with the development process. As a team built to serve an entire company with dozens of potential clients, requests for new development and design were coming from all angles and often from folks who lacked the technical background to make informed requests or to understand the complexity of the "ask." Put simply, my goal was to create some form of exercise that would allow members of the team to better understand where their frustration was coming from, and to help managers to understand how to overcome many of the communication hurdles that lead to scope creep and spell certain doom for development projects. What follows is a description of this exercise, shared with the audience in the hopes that other lead developers might find useful elements to use with their own teams.